Leni Riefenstahl is considered one of the most controversial women of the 20th century as an artist and a Nazi propagandist. Her films Triumph of the Will and Olympia stand for perfectly staged body worship and the celebration of the superior and victorious. At the same time, these images project contempt for the imperfect and weak. Riefenstahl’s aesthetics are more present than ever today - but is that also true for their implied message? The film examines this question using documents from Riefenstahl's estate, including private films, photos, recordings and letters. It uncovers fragments of her biography and places them in an extended historical context.
The Garden Cinema View:
A fascinating study of a complex, groundbreaking, and deeply controversial filmmaker. This documentary burrows into the questions of complicity, responsibility, and the relationship between art, media, and politics that engulfed Leni Riefenstahl’s postwar life. Whilst she remains too slippery to ultimately pin down, the sense of an artist attempting to control her image and narrative emerges strongly in this film.
Riefenstahl’s own films are themselves acutely interesting and spectacular even as the act of watching them can be profoundly upsetting. So it is a shame that there is not more analysis of how this imagery proved so effective as a kind of aesthetic of fascism, and indeed how it continues to reoccur from everything from advertising to family blockbusters.
